The rise of China has been a multi-decade story and increasingly deemed as a developing threat to the status quo and the United States’ primacy. Early on, President Trump focused on the trade imbalance between the two countries and used tariffs as the means to right-size the commercial relationship. Along the way, the China hawks have hitched themselves to this wagon and pushed their anti-China agenda and a set of beliefs that a strong China is a great threat to the United States. The trade dispute involves China’s inconsistency with free and fair trade, including tariffs, quotas, currency manipulation, forced technology transfer, and industrial subsidies. Today, under President Trump’s banner of a “more just, secure, and peaceful world”, the trade dispute is intertwined with grievances against China’s debt diplomacy, military expansionism, repression of people of faith and construction of a surveillance state. The anti-China list seems to be growing daily and now also includes Hong Kong’s special status.
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